Official Report: search what was said in Parliament
The Official Report is a written record of public meetings of the Parliament and committees.
The Official Report search offers lots of different ways to find the information you’re looking for. The search is used as a professional tool by researchers and third-party organisations. It is also used by members of the public who may have less parliamentary awareness. This means it needs to provide the ability to run complex searches, and the ability to browse reports or perform a simple keyword search.
Searching by different views
The web version of the Official Report has three different views:
- Report: this is the whole Official Report for a particular meeting of a committee or Parliament
- Item of business: this is each individual agenda item in an Official Report. For example, Portfolio Questions would be the item of business in a Meeting of the Parliament report
- Contribution: this is each time someone has made a spoken contribution to a meeting.
Depending on the kind of search you want to do, one of these views will be the best option. The default view is to show the report for each meeting of Parliament or a committee. For a simple keyword search, the results will be shown by item of business.
Search by MSP
When you choose to search by a particular MSP, the results returned will show each spoken contribution in Parliament or a committee, ordered by date with the most recent contributions first. This will usually return a lot of results, but you can refine your search by keyword, date and/or by meeting (committee or Chamber business).
We’ve chosen to display the entirety of each MSP’s contribution in the search results. This is intended to reduce the number of times that users need to click into an actual report to get the information that they’re looking for, but in some cases it can lead to very short contributions (“Yes.”) or very long ones (Ministerial statements, for example.) We’ll keep this under review and get feedback from users on whether this approach best meets their needs.
Searching by keyword
There are two types of keyword search:
- A keyword search without quotation marks will look for every instance of each word used and rank the results by frequency and proximity. It will also include variants of the keywords using “porter stemming”. This is when the search looks for the “stem” of a word regardless of its ending. So, for example, a search for [salmon farm] will return each instance of “salmon” and each instance of “farm” as well as potentially including results for “farms”, “farmed” and “farming”.
- A keyword search with quotation marks will only return instances of that exact phrase used. So, for example, a search for “salmon farm” in quotation marks will only return instances of that exact phrase.
Combining search filters
If you select an MSP’s name from the dropdown menu, and add a phrase in quotation marks to the keyword field, then the search will return only examples of when the MSP said those exact words. You can further refine this search by adding a date range or selecting a particular committee or Meeting of the Parliament.
More complex keyword searches
It’s also possible to run basic Boolean searches. For example:
- a search for “salmon farm” AND “Loch Lomond” will return only results which include both exact phrases
- a search for “salmon farm” NOT “Loch Lomond” will return results for “salmon farm” but exclude results which also include “Loch Lomond”
- a search for “salmon farm” OR “Loch Lomond” will return all results for “salmon farm” and all results for “Loch Lomond” regardless of whether they appear together
Searching by date
There are two ways of searching by date.
You can either use the Start date and End date options to run a search across a particular date range. For example, you may know that a particular subject was discussed at some point in the last few weeks and choose a date range to reflect that.
Alternatively, you can use one of the pre-defined date ranges under “Select a time period”. These are:
- Current session (all Official Reports since the current sessions started)
- Last 6 months
- Last 12 months
- each of the previous sessions of Parliament. (Selecting the information icon above the “Select a time period” menu will give you the exact dates for each session.)
- All sessions
- You can also choose to select a custom date range, although adding a Start or End date will mean the search automatically defaults to this option.
If you search by an individual session, the list of MSPs and committees will automatically update to show only the MSPs and committees which were current during that session. For example, if you select Session 1 you will be show a list of MSPs and committees from Session 1.
If you add a custom date range which crosses more than one session of Parliament, the lists of MSPs and committees will update to show the information that was current at that time.
All Official Reports of meetings in the Debating Chamber of the Scottish Parliament.
All Official Reports of public meetings of committees.
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Displaying 843 contributions
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Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Scottish Public Inquiries (Cost-effectiveness)
Meeting date: 20 May 2025
Craig Hoy
Good morning, Professor Cameron.
I have been looking back at the use of royal commissions in the past, and I counted that, in the 1970s, there were 12 such commissions. Now they are very rare; presumably, the Government, the Parliament and the public weaned themselves off that form of inquiry and found different ways of making those big decisions. Is that the kind of seminal tipping point that we have got to now, do you think? Should we be looking at a fundamental alternative to public inquiries?
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Scottish Budget Process in Practice
Meeting date: 20 May 2025
Craig Hoy
On more recent issues, it emerged over the weekend that you want to get civil servants back into work. It was also, and somewhat regrettably, reported that, at present, you cannot quantify how many civil servants are seeking to watch Netflix or surfing pornography on their work devices because the number is so high. On the culture of the public sector reform programme, how ambitious will you be about getting civil servants back to work or about ensuring that they are more productive wherever they are working? There seems to be a gap in that the additional investment that you have put into the civil service has not been met by a commensurate increase in productivity, perhaps because civil servants are getting up to things that they should not be doing.
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Scottish Budget Process in Practice
Meeting date: 20 May 2025
Craig Hoy
You talked earlier about making sure that targeted outcomes are driven by your spending choices. Recently, it emerged that the total cost of Government spin doctors has reached £100 million over three years—I concede that that figure includes spending by health boards. Will that kind of Government and associated departmental expenditure be included in your public sector reform programme? Before you allow such a significant increase in the future, would it be better to tie that expenditure to a public service outcome target? What could the public service outcome target be for increases in expenditure on spin doctors as opposed to doctors, for example?
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Scottish Budget Process in Practice
Meeting date: 20 May 2025
Craig Hoy
My final question goes back to the convener’s question about large in-year transfers. I want to close this one issue down. A number of stakeholder bodies that have come to the committee have said that they would like what the convener described to happen and that it happens elsewhere. Are you saying that it is impractical, undesirable or impossible? Which is it?
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Scottish Public Inquiries (Cost-effectiveness)
Meeting date: 20 May 2025
Craig Hoy
On the issue of judge-led inquiries, Sir John Sturrock, in his submission, bemoans the fact that there is a “judicial, detailed forensic approach”, which he calls “overly legalistic”, and which he says leads to an adversarial system. However, it does not have to be that way, does it? Presumably, we can smash that approach and start again.
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Scottish Public Inquiries (Cost-effectiveness)
Meeting date: 20 May 2025
Craig Hoy
Finally, in relation to mission creep and budget creep, I presume that there are downsides to setting a limit on or a budget for an inquiry. Based on your experience, what could be the negative consequences of such a move?
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Scottish Public Inquiries (Cost-effectiveness)
Meeting date: 20 May 2025
Craig Hoy
Thank you.
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Scottish Budget Process in Practice
Meeting date: 20 May 2025
Craig Hoy
Good morning. Some of my questions are linked to what has been discussed already, so we will probably dance around a bit.
On financial literacy in schools, I received a written answer yesterday to a question about a Bank of England pilot project—which is taking place in England but could equally apply in Scotland—in relation to increasing the uptake of economics as a subject in schools. The written answer reveals that, in Scottish schools, there is uptake of economics at national 5 level in only 12 schools, at higher in 37 schools and at advanced higher in only five schools. In part, that could be because there is no demand, but might you be keen to join the Bank of England programme to ensure that people leave school with a level of financial literacy that would perhaps give them a greater understanding of tax and spending as they move forward in life?
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Scottish Budget Process in Practice
Meeting date: 20 May 2025
Craig Hoy
You said that work has been done to increase understanding of the tax system because that leads to greater compliance, but another way to achieve that would be to simplify the tax system. Have you taken external advice on that from either the tax advisory group or a consultancy?
Finance and Public Administration Committee [Draft]
Scottish Budget Process in Practice
Meeting date: 20 May 2025
Craig Hoy
You are talking about a potential £9 billion black hole. That assertion does not put food on the table, and you should surely do that work before you make such an assertion.
